Konrad OldMoney Brings The Cool To Videogame Music – Forbes

Johann D’Souza

OldMoney has opened up a whole different career as a producer and composer for videogames.

Konrad OldMoney is a Canadian producer and composer who started out in the early 2000s producing dancehall, the Angolan/Portuguese dance music known as kuduro, and hip-hop. He was a member of the band Smokey Robotic, featuring producer !llmind. Recently, Konrad has also been writing and producing for a pop singer he calls “the Polish Justin Bieber,” Dawid Kwiatkowski.

But in the midst of all of that, OldMoney has opened up a whole different career as a producer and composer for videogames. He has worked on in-game music and trailers for titles like FIFA17, Fight Night Champion, SSX Deadly Descents and much more.

It was when Smokey Robotic went on hiatus that OldMoney first got into composing for games.

“That’s around the time I started getting really, really interested in the whole psychology of music—how and why people react to music in the way that they do,” he told me. “That really helped me solidify a lot of these videogame contracts. I’ve always been interested in why things happen. So the corporate world started embracing me quite a lot.”

While composing for games, OldMoney is provided with detailed PDFs by the game companies, often running into the scores of pages.

“They bring me entire PDFs of targets on what music should make people feel when, and for what kind of people. They explain to you what’s happening and what they need the music to do,” he said.

The PDFs break down the demographics not only of the players but of who chooses each character within the game itself.

“They will create a trajectory,” the producer reveals. “They know what kind of fans will take to each character, and why. I’ve gotten a 90-page PDF on the psychology of some of these characters.”

Johann D’Souza

Photo by Johann D’Souza

Those PDFs, along with a few videos and “mood boards, pictures, things like that,” are often all OldMoney has to go on. Because the games are often still in the works, he physically has to go into the company’s office to play them—something he will occasionally do.

In addition to working on the games themselves, Konrad sometimes does music for trailers for videogames, which presents its own set of challenges.

“For trailers, you get a draft of the video, so you can sync to it,” he said. “Then you work together with the video team. It’s a back-and-forth process.”

His success in the gaming world has led game companies to search him out specifically.

“People come to me for ‘the Konrad sound,’ which I find hilarious,” he laughs. “Because here I am thinking I do all these different genres of music, but people still know it’s me. I’ve managed to carve out a niche. I make the corporate people and marketing people happy, but also the music has a lot of street cred to actual music fans who are consuming these genres because I care enough. I get brought on these projects to make sure that they’re cool.”